


Turn, Return

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Enemies to Friends, Food Porn, Friendship, Gen, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25250077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: You can't ever go back where you started from. But maybe you don't have to; maybe nostalgia isn't all it's cracked up to be. Set between seasons.
Relationships: Danny Rand/Colleen Wing, Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47
Collections: Eat Drink and Make Merry 2020





	Turn, Return

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glorious_spoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/gifts).



For Danny, coming back to New York for the second time was a gentler kind of dislocation than the sharp shell-shock of the first. Months of water under any number of bridges had calmed him, brought him down from the ragged edge of anger and hurt that had driven him for so long. Months of traveling with Colleen, learning himself, learning the world -- and then he came back to a final fight with the Hand, and after the dust had settled from that, there were new friends gained, and one new friend lost.

And there was the decision to stay in New York, with Colleen -- to make a home of the cold, empty dojo, and a home of the strange, foreign city that had once been the only home he'd known.

("I'll come with you, if you want to travel again," she murmured, late at night. He still couldn't sleep in a bed. They'd rolled a futon out on the floor. "But I think it might be nice to stay in the same place for a while.")

It wasn't like he had anywhere to go, anyway. The Hand was .... if not _gone,_ then scattered and broken. There was no K'un Lun to go back to. But with one city gone, there was still another that needed him.

*

Coming back meant dealing with a lot of things he'd left behind. Not the least of those was his father's company ... and Ward.

Ward, who was actually being friendly now, in a reserved and cool kind of way. Danny hadn't been sure if the brief thaw at Harold's funeral would have evaporated by now --

( _"Don't expect us to believe that you care about Ward"_ )

\-- and he hadn't really gotten much of a read on that one way or the other while he was traveling, because his only contact with Ward had been brief, impersonal emails about the company. Ward had been out of town when Danny got back, which had at least removed him from immediate danger with the Hand. It also meant that Danny had a few weeks to get his feet under him in New York before Ward landed in town and Danny had to figure out what to do about that. Somehow they started having coffee every once in a while to talk about the company in person rather than via email.

It was -- tentative. That was the best word for it. They were ... Danny didn't know what, exactly. He'd thought of Ward as family once. Now, he wasn't sure. Business partners, perhaps? At least Ward seemed to think so. He kept asking Danny questions about the company that Danny didn't care about, or know the answers to. Danny wasn't sure if Ward thought that he had soaked up corporate knowledge as a ten-year-old, and he kept having to point out that his education had stopped in the fifth grade, so what did Ward _think_ Danny was going to do, anyway, drop into New York with all his father's business knowledge written in the cells of his body?

"Oh, but you have plenty of opinions about running the company when you're telling me not to do things that make good business sense and throwing your 51% behind it," Ward groused over sandwiches at a cafe where he'd told Danny to meet him for lunch. They had been doing more of this kind of thing, meeting for lunches that hovered in a weird between-space, not quite business and not quite personal.

"I just don't want the company with my name on it to do unethical things."

"Yeah, that's almost exactly what your memo says. You want us to come up with an _ethics statement_ now?"

"It's a thing!" Danny protested. "I looked it up! We should have one, and then we should follow it."

"You know," Ward said, putting down his sandwich with only one bite taken out of it, "there is _literally_ an office with your name on it. Where you could be sitting every day, making decisions like this and actually putting them into practice, instead of throwing them at me and then going back to ... what the hell _are_ you doing now, anyway?"

"Renovating the dojo with Colleen," Danny said. "Volunteering at the center. Looking for a job --"

"A _job,"_ Ward burst out. He laughed. It was a mocking sound, more like the old Ward. 

"An actual job," Danny pressed on stubbornly. "Doing something real."

"You _have_ a job, a 'real' job, and that job is running the company you almost got killed trying to wrestle away from my dad."

"I know. I just ..." It was hard to explain it to Ward when he couldn't quite explain it to himself. "I don't want to live off Rand money all my life."

 _"Your_ money. _Your_ company. You can't just make that go away."

"That's not what I'm trying to do," Danny said, but maybe Ward kind of had a point. Talking to Ward was always a little bit weird that way, because Ward, abrasive as he was, had this way of just angling in and pointing out things that Danny hadn't even realized about himself.

And it made Danny think about how everyone he knew now, everyone he was close to or even starting to get a little bit close to, he'd known for less than a year. Everyone else was gone, dead or completely out of his life. His parents, Harold, the monks in K'un Lun, Joy, Davos ...

And then there was Ward.

Danny looked across the table at Ward, who was tearing the crust absently off the sandwich he hadn't eaten most of. Danny was only just getting to know Ward as an adult, so he wasn't sure yet what was normal for Ward, but he never really knew what to say about the way Ward always looked various degrees of wiped out, exhausted, or just plain not that great. The blue-gray smudges under his eyes were a permanent fixture of his face. And ... okay, Ward had _always_ looked a little bit that way (distracted, tired, not quite all there) and Danny had eventually figured out most of why, but now Harold was gone, and ...

... and, well, he knew better than anyone that people being gone didn't mean their legacy was gone, or their impact on your life.

"Hey, Ward, are you okay?" he asked.

Ward looked up sharply and stared at Danny for a minute, and Danny had the unpleasant sensation of something snapping -- as if, in their tentative dance between a professional and personal relationship, he'd just stepped over a line he didn't know was there.

"Why wouldn't I be?" Ward asked, with an edge to his voice.

"Well ... your _dad_ , Ward, and all of that --"

"That was sarcasm, Danny," Ward said. He reached for his water glass, trying for casual, but Danny was startled to see that Ward's hand was shaking slightly; his control was that tight.

It felt suddenly like a tightrope, like there were so many things he could say that would cause them both to fall off, and lose all the ground they'd gained since he walked into Ward's office all those months ago and things started going so horribly off the rails. He just didn't know what the right thing was.

"If you want to talk --" he began, and could see immediately from Ward's face that it had been the wrong thing.

"I think we're about done here." Ward tossed his credit card on the table. "Go get a real job or whatever makes you happy. Hit me up if you want a reference."

*

It was Danny who had started these lunches in the first place, a couple of weeks after Ward got back to town from overseas and their email exchanges had turned into tentative coffee dates to talk about business. He used his 51%-of-the-company clout to get past all the security until Ward's no-longer-Megan assistant stopped him at the door of Ward's office. "Do you have an appointment?" she asked.

"No? But he'll want to see me?" He held up a pair of large takeout bags. "I brought lunch."

"Sit," she told him, pointing to a chair.

Danny texted Ward a few times ... okay, a lot of times, until finally Ward's office door opened and Ward stood there, staring at him in flat disbelief. "Did you just text me five different pictures of my own outer office?"

"I was trying to get your attention."

"Do you want me to call security, Mr. Meachum?" Not-Megan asked.

Ward looked like he was considering it, but then he shook his head. "No." He hesitated, looking at Danny. "I emailed you the paperwork I needed you to sign. You didn't have to come in person."

"I know." Danny held out the takeout bags. "I brought lunch? From this noodle place, a block down from the dojo. Colleen and I eat there a lot and it's, um. Really good."

Ward gave him a long stare and then sighed and stepped back and opened the door wide enough to admit Danny. "Hold my calls for half an hour," he told Not-Megan, who nodded.

Danny looked around the office as the door closed behind him. His last sight of it had involved shattered glass and pieces of furniture and ceiling everywhere. It had been rebuilt, obviously, back to its old glassed-in grandeur with the windows looking out on the city. But there were differences too. Smooth wood paneling where there had been chrome and marble, a little less austere. The couches looked more sittable, somehow. Where there had been a minibar with decanters of amber-colored alcohol, now there was just a crystal pitcher of water on a sideboard.

"Do you like spicy?" Danny said, looking around for somewhere to put the bags. "I got both spicy and not, because I wasn't sure."

"You didn't even _like_ spicy food when you were a kid," Ward muttered as he crossed back around to the other side of his desk.

"Didn't I?" It was hard to remember now, all those old memories overwritten by fifteen years in another place. Had he hated the food at first? He'd hated everything; it was all a blur of misery and strangeness and desperate grief and loneliness.

Ward, he realized, was a repository of childhood memories he'd lost -- the one remaining person (or, well, the one person he was still on speaking terms with) who had known him back then.

Rather than sitting down at the desk, as Danny had thought he was going to, Ward dug into his bottom desk drawer and straightened up with a rolled-up handful of --

"Is that napkins and silverware?" Danny asks. " _Cloth_ napkins. You keep that in your _desk?"_

"Habit," Ward said. "I used to eat in here a lot when I was working late. Dad insisted on ..." He broke off, and smiled crookedly, and not very happily. "Anyway. Habit."

And that fell with a resounding clang into the ensuing silence.

But ... there was food, spread out on a low coffee table in front of the new, more-comfortable couch; there were shrimp dumplings that Danny insisted Ward had to try, and black bean noodles with cilantro, and fish balls in a broth so spicy that it made Ward choke. Danny had done more than just get spicy and non-spicy; he'd gotten a little of almost everything that looked good, because he wasn't sure what Ward would like and he wanted to make sure they both had something to enjoy.

They mainly talked about business, but it was ... relaxed. Nice. It felt like the start of something.

*

"I don't know why I'm the one who has to make all the concessions all the time," Danny muttered, the day after his somewhat aborted lunch with Ward. He was sitting on the dojo floor and sanding down the old flooring. "I mean, he could do some of the work too."

"Is this about Ward again?" Colleen said from the far side of the room, where she was striping long strokes of stain onto the sanded floorboards. "Ward, who tried to murder you and sold you to Bakuto?"

"I know you don't trust him. Maybe I shouldn't either." Danny looked back down at his work. A moment later, there were swift sock-clad footsteps behind him, and Colleen's breath on the back of his neck, her arm around his chest.

"I don't trust him, you're right," she said, resting her forehead against the back of his head. "But ... I can't tell you what to do. Or how to feel." She sighed, her breath stirring his hair. "You're looking for family. I understand that. I just hope you're not looking in the wrong place."

They stayed that way for a little while, Danny leaning back into her, breathing in her warm scent of soap and floor polish and _Colleen._ The unspoken part of the conversation hung in the air between them: that he _had_ trusted, and gotten burned, with Ward even. And Colleen's safe place had blown up in her face.

But ... things _did_ work out sometimes. Like with him and Colleen. And with Jessica and Luke and ... Matt, who Danny still shied away from thinking about.

And it was that -- thinking about everyone he'd lost, about all the things he hadn't said, and people he hadn't said it to -- that made him think it was worth trying again. Even if Ward pushed him away. Even if apologies that should have run both ways had mainly only been coming from Danny's direction.

Because he'd already learned the meaning of "too late," and learned it well.

Fall down, get up, keep trying. It was how he'd made it all the way to the Iron Fist. He wasn't the best or the brightest or the most skilled or the most talented. He was just the one who didn't know how to give up.

*

But to his surprise, he wasn't the one who ended up doing the reaching out this time. A couple of days went by, punctuated with the casual business-related texts from Ward that had become standard for them: Ward seemed determined to carry on as if nothing had happened. At least he wasn't shutting Danny out, but Danny's one "So ... lunch tomorrow?" text had gone unanswered. 

And then Ward turned up at the door of the dojo with takeout bags.

"Hi," he said. It was raining, but not enough to knock down the early-summer heat; the city was like a steam bath, and Ward, in his business suit, looked damp and wilted. He held up the bags, and Danny got a ghost of deja vu, which got stronger when Ward added, "It's from a noodle place. I'm not sure if it's _your_ noodle place; there are like ten of them in a two-block radius. So I picked the one with the highest Yelp rating. I don't actually know that much about what you like. You usually let me pick the restaurant, and I sort of ... never realized that, 'til I was trying to think what to pick up. Can I, um ... come in?"

"Oh, right, right," Danny said, and stepped back quickly. In the heat, he was barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt. Ward was the one who looked out of place in his suit and tie.

Ward came in and looked around at the construction clutter. "Are you doing all of this _yourself?"_

"Ourselves," Danny said pointedly, and just then Colleen came in from the bedroom, also stripped down to a tank top and sweat pants. She froze briefly when she saw Ward. Ward froze, too, as if the idea that Danny wasn't here alone had never occurred to him.

"So," Colleen said after a moment, " _not_ the cabinet door delivery, then."

"No," Ward said, with a small, half-frozen smile, and it occurred to Danny that the last time Ward had been in here, he'd been bribing Colleen to keep Danny locked up in a mental hospital forever ... and he shut _that_ line of thought down, fast.

Instead, Danny reached out and quickly took the bags, or at least the nearest bags. Ward was loaded down. It looked like he'd replicated Danny's selection of everything on the menu that could be carried by one human being.

"Colleen, Ward brought lunch. Uh ... looks like a lot of lunch. Do we have any clean bowls?"

"I can find something," Colleen said, recovering a certain amount of grace and poise. She went into the kitchen, or the area that was going to be the kitchen; everything was torn apart, but there was a work surface made from planks, and the sink and refrigerator were functional, along with an electric kettle. "Ward, would you like tea?"

"Uh ... sure," Ward said, with the general attitude of someone who was watching his plans slide out of his control and glide down a long steep hill on a runaway skateboard.

There wasn't a lot of furniture not currently covered with plastic sheeting or sawdust and construction debris. They managed to dig up a couch, and Ward perched on one end of it, still fully dressed in business attire from his suit jacket to his wingtips, while sweating visibly. Colleen sat on the floor.

"Ward, take off that jacket, you're gonna die," Danny said, spreading out containers so they could select what they wanted, buffet-style. "We had to unhook all the AC units while we were doing the windows. Oh wow, Colleen, look, he got those pork buns you like."

"Well, I guess that explains why it's a hundred and ninety in here." Ward tugged on his tie to loosen it and then ... Danny could almost see him fold like a house of cards and give up. He took off the tie and the jacket and, after a hesitation, peeled off his sweaty shirt as well, leaving him in a white, sweat-soaked T-shirt.

Colleen raised an eloquent eyebrow but said nothing as she delicately chopsticked up and then nibbled on a shrimp that had been floating in a broth glistening richly with oil. She actually had not said anything further, just made them three cups of green tea (Ward had taken a single sip of his and then left it alone) and collected an enormous quantity of food in her bowl. It appeared that she'd decided if Ward was going to feed them, she planned to take full advantage of it.

The entire conversation, so far, had consisted of occasional stilted comments and a lot of silence. The problem, Danny thought -- or at least hoped -- wasn't that he'd broken everything at the restaurant the other day. It was that they normally talked business; the company was the warp and the weft of their pretext for spending time together. Personal topics dropped in rarely. But with Colleen right here, it seemed rude to drop into their usual business talk, and even Ward appeared to be picking up on that.

The last time Danny tried to bring up anything personal, Ward had stormed off in a huff.

Then again, when had Danny ever cared about sticking his foot in his mouth up to the knee? It had been happening to him since he got back to New York the first time.

And with that, a sort of dam cracked and burst inside him. They _couldn't_ walk on eggshells around each other, he and Ward. It just didn't work. They weren't that kind of people. He'd first gotten to know Ward -- the person Ward had turned into, the person he was as an adult -- when Ward sent Rand security to track him down; when Danny pointed a gun in Ward's face; when Ward pushed him off a building. He'd seen Ward raging and miserable and covered in blood; and Ward had seen Danny absolutely _losing_ it, and had tried to sell him out to the Hand; and Danny had stood with him at Harold's cremation and watched Ward stand unblinking, staring into the furnace flames, until Ward's knees wobbled and Danny hesitantly, tentatively put a steadying hand on his shoulder.

Why in the world were they even trying to tiptoe around each other now?

"You're not sleeping much, are you?" he said, and Ward looked up quickly from the beef dumplings and noodles in his bowl. He looked startled, wary, and a little bit angry.

Colleen stood up abruptly. "I was just thinking," she said, putting her bowl on the edge of the coffee table. "Maybe I'll make a coffee run. Ward, what do you want?"

"I ... uh, just ... coffee. Black." He was staring at her, and Danny was too. He'd seen Colleen drink coffee like four or five times since he'd known her.

"I need the caffeine boost," she said, as if responding to the unspoken question, and kissed Danny's forehead. "I know you hate it. I'll get you a matcha smoothie, how does that sound?"

She grabbed a pork bun and went to the door, slipping into the shoes beside the entryway, and was out before Danny could say anything.

"So," Ward said after a minute. "Are we ... breaking up the party? Because if so, I'm already late getting back to --"

"Ward," Danny said, "she's bringing you back coffee. Hang out for a bit." He looked at Ward more closely. Ward didn't look like he'd slept at all since the last time Danny had seen him; he was that much grayer, that much more worn down.

"What?" Ward said, and defensively stabbed a fish ball with his chopstick like a harpoon.

"You know, in Vietnam and Cambodia and China, looking for the Hand, I had nightmares almost every night."

He paused, waited for Ward to fill the space, and after a moment's startled silence Ward said, "Okay."

"Everyone I couldn't save. My parents. The monks who guarded the passage that _I_ was supposed to be guarding." He smiled a little, though it wasn't at all funny. "Even Harold. I just wish I could have made all of that turn out differently, somehow."

Ward gave him a weird look. "Danny, there is no force on earth that could have stopped Harold from being Harold. Trust me on that."

"I know," Danny said. He found himself wanting to curl in on himself, an old habit from childhood: tuck his hands between his thighs, curl his shoulders inward. It was an age-old instinct to curl up and protect the sensitive inner parts of the body; he'd learned the truth of that when he learned to fight. But it had never stopped people from hurting him, not really. "There's a lot that I can't change."

"Yeah, welcome to the club," Ward said. He laid down his chopsticks and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "Danny, what are we _doing?"_

"What do you mean?"

"My dad killed your parents," Ward said, looking at him steadily. "I tried to kill you."

"You also held my hand on my first day of first grade because I was scared," Danny said.

"What?" That obviously threw him for a loop. "I don't remember that."

"Me and Joy, we started school at the same grade school you went to. You were really embarrassed by us. You told us to stay away from you and pretend we didn't know you." He smiled a little. "And then we got off the bus, and Joy and I were absolutely petrified. And you held our hands --"

Ward's hand had seemed so big to him then, wrapped around his own. It was disconcerting to look back and realize that Ward had been just a sixth-grader, a child like himself.

"... and took us where we needed to go. I wasn't scared at all anymore. I remember thinking that I didn't have to be scared of anything, not with you there."

Ward was staring at him with a blank and unreadable expression on his face. He looked away after a minute. "Nothing except me, I guess."

"Nobody's perfect," Danny said.

Ward laughed, sudden and sharp. He bowed his head and ran his hand through his sweat-damp hair. With the defensive armor of the suit stripped off, he looked somehow younger, the age difference between himself and Danny (which had seemed insurmountable when they were kids) wiped away by time and change.

"Colleen's been getting that coffee for an awfully long time," he said.

"Maybe she had to go a ways to find a Starbucks."

"Danny," Ward said abruptly, looking up from his clasped hands with a pure clear misery on his face, "running the company together is one thing, we can do that. But ... _this_ ... I don't know how ..." He hesitated, as if he didn't know how to finish that sentence.

The look on Ward's face caught and pulled on some deep place in Danny's chest. "I don't either," Danny said. "But ... you brought me shrimp dumplings." He reached for the last dumpling in the takeout carton, put it in his mouth and swallowed through the tension in his throat, and he said, "You remembered that I like them."

It was another of those knife-edge moments, but it only lasted a bare instant before Ward huffed out something that was almost like a laugh. "Next time I try to kill you, I'll make sure and put shrimp dumplings in your apology gift basket."

"There won't be a next time," Danny said, and that, at least, he was sure of.

*

It was a full hour later when Colleen got back with drinks -- black coffee for Ward, the promised matcha smoothie for Danny, and an iced tea latte that she was sucking on with singleminded determination. By that point, Ward was fast asleep on the couch with an afghan (knit for them by one of the old ladies at Colleen's community center) thrown lightly over him and a box fan set up to direct a soothing breeze. It had been surprisingly easy to talk him out of going back to the office this afternoon; between the food and the heat, he'd been half asleep in his noodles anyway.

"Thanks," Danny murmured, taking the smoothie cup from Colleen's hand. People in this city had no idea how amazing iced drinks were on a hot day, simply no idea.

"Did you work out anything?" Colleen asked quietly, glancing at Ward on the couch. One of his arms dangled off, brushing the floor. Danny had put away the leftovers, and there was a _lot_ of it. He and Colleen would be eating noodles and fish balls for the next two days.

"There really wasn't a whole lot to work out," Danny said. "I think we're pretty good, actually."

"Really."

Her skeptical tone made him grin; he put an arm around her and pulled her in, pressing his face into her hair. "I like that you're on my side."

Colleen shoved Ward's cardboard coffee cup onto the makeshift 2x12 countertop, pushing it back against the wall beside the electric kettle and toaster. "Better than the other side."

"Don't I know it," Danny said, pressing a kiss to the side of her head, and she made a small noise, not a happy one. "Colleen? Are you okay?"

"I just don't want you to get hurt." She leaned into him. "It's like you said once. We don't have the best track record at trusting people."

Danny hugged her, and glanced over her head at Ward on the couch. "But we can't stop trying, or we'll never trust anyone at all."

"True," she muttered into his chest, and then, with a sort of bright determination: "Well, at least he brought food. Did you two eat all the pork buns, or are there some left?"

Danny laughed, and opened the refrigerator door.


End file.
